[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) - Infrastructure for em...
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Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) - Infrastructure for embedded lending
services
Hi HN! We're Jon and Matthew, the co-founders of Lendflow
(https://lendflow.io). We make it easy for software companies to
embed lending services into their product. It allows you to easily
create your own version of Square, Shopify or Stripe Capital and
offer it to your customers in-app. Does it take your users 15-90
days to get paid out by their customers? You can embed a factoring
product that gives them the option to get paid instantly for a
small fee. Do your users purchase materials, supplies, inventory,
or equipment on your platform? Embed a loan in your platform to
give them timely access to capital to help them spread out upfront
project costs, take advantage of wholesale rates on their
purchases, or invest in more assets for their business. We've been
in the lending space since 2014 and have helped tens of thousands
of small businesses acquire financing. We saw the struggles on both
sides: how tough it is for small businesses to find the right
lending products and how difficult it was for lenders to find the
right customer at the right time. Companies like Square, Shopify
and Stripe have launched capital programs for their users that
allow them to get better priced, more timely funding for their
business than they could elsewhere. It's helped their business
customers invest in themselves, grow and transact more, and made
them more loyal to those services. And we're only scratching the
surface! The problem is that launching lending programs is
complex, timing consuming and costly. It can take a team of 10 at
least a few million dollars and 18+ months to get to market with
their program. It takes significant upfront commitment and
investment, making it very risky. This means the lending services
aren't offered and businesses don't get access to the capital they
need. It is really gratifying to see the impact of providing
increased access to capital. We've seen restaurants who invested
money in a digital transformation not only survive through the
pandemic, but double their revenues and improve their margins by
embracing take out and delivery. We've seen an HVAC company gain
the ability to hire more technicians and triple the amount of
customers they are able to service on a given day. A home
renovation contractor was able to spread out his upfront costs over
time to take on multiple projects at once, increasing his monthly
revenue by 3x over the past 6 months. An ecommerce company was able
to purchase inventory at wholesale rates and invest in an ad
campaign to drive traffic to their store to increase sales by 240%.
We provide all of the infrastructure and tools to make it easy to
launch capital products that can have this impact for small
businesses. We've had platform customers get a lending program up
and running in a day. You can customize the funding products and
experience based on the needs of your own customers. You can use
our platform to build a data advantage and more efficiently go to
market with your own funding service. We have a lending API, pre-
built customizable applications, lending service provider
aggregation API, white-labeled sales and support teams to walk
customers through the process, and connections into 85 of the top
lenders and funding products available to businesses. We also can
spin up custom endpoints to add new data points to underwriting
models to help businesses obtain better rates/terms and to deliver
a better experience. We are paid by 3rd party lenders for the work
we do to onboard the small business for funding, and we split those
fees with our platform partners. If you build your own funding
service, you simply pay a subscription for using our tools. We're
live and integrated with 32 platforms and are processing thousands
of business financing applications per month. We successfully
helped businesses access millions of dollars from best-in-market
lending services. We also have customers who've used the data from
their lending program to build their own custom funding products on
Lendflow. We'd love to hear how we can build better in-product
lending experiences with you. The possibilities in lending are just
starting to be explored. We're super excited to build the next
generation of lending products. We'd love to hear your thoughts,
please leave your feedback below!
Author : jon-fry
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-03-04 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
| festinalente wrote:
| Definitely see how embedded lending could be a value-add for a
| number of businesses! Two questions:
|
| 1. Is the main draw for your customers being able to increase
| customer retention over time?
|
| 2. How are applications distributed to the top lenders, on the
| back end? Is there an auction process?
| jon-fry wrote:
| 1. I think the main draw depends on the objectives of the
| customer. For many the priority is going to be improving
| retention, but for others it may be increasing revenue per user
| or driving adoption of another product or feature. Ultimately
| it all leads to higher retention, that just may not be the main
| draw starting out.
|
| 2. We compile data on the business as if we're underwriting
| them for a loan, although we never actually lend or take
| balance sheet risk. We use the data to place them with a batch
| of lenders (typically about 3) that's going to be the best fit
| for their risk profile and use of funds. We take the best
| pricing from the batch to present to the borrower. The goal is
| to send them to as few lenders as possible while acquiring the
| best pricing available on the market.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| This may be a naive question: is this a white labelled Klarna-
| like service?
| jon-fry wrote:
| There's definitely some areas of overlap in that we're both
| offering the ability to add financing to a use workflow. Some
| differences are that we're focused on small business while
| Klarna is focused on consumer. Another is that they're focused
| on a consumer checkout process with a buy now pay later
| product.
|
| While you could certainly create that type of product on
| Lendflow, it's not limited to just buy now pay later. There's a
| much broader set of funding products you can build and user
| workflows you can integrate them into.
| dyeje wrote:
| Isn't the field for this a bit crowded at this point with players
| like Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, etc?
| nrmitchi wrote:
| AFAIK those players are all _consumer_ lending services. Ie, I
| want to buy a Peloton, and spread it out over 36 monthly
| payments.
|
| This sounds more like _business_ short term lending. Ie, I have
| 100k in orders, but need 20k to buy materials up-front. Or I
| have 100k in outstanding payments due in 30 days, but I 'd
| rather get 95k right now.
| jon-fry wrote:
| Those are companies providing consumer loans placed in a
| ecommerce checkout workflow.
|
| We're focused on business funding options placed in a broader
| set of workflows. Think lending services in workflows based
| around payments, procurement, invoicing, ect.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| so is this more of a cashflow tool? you guys are an in-app
| float?
| [deleted]
| kornish wrote:
| The description makes it sound like this is lending to
| businesses, not consumers.
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Interesting. I heard Immad from Mercury talk about you. Really
| impressed that you started this up without the "team of 10 and a
| few million dollars"! How did you manage it or am I misreading
| something?
| jon-fry wrote:
| We've been building in the space for a number of years on
| previous products/companies. It's been a long learning process.
| All in all, I'd say at least that has gone into it!
| chuinard wrote:
| I like the idea but am irritated that there's upfront Pricing
| involved. If my software is sending you customers for loans I
| should be sharing a commission with you and that's that. Why do
| you need money from me to let me send you prospects?
| wattswolf wrote:
| We don't require money upfront. Our service is, and always has
| been, free.
|
| We do however offer bespoke packages and custom integrations
| around our offering for those that wish to utilize it.
| ahstilde wrote:
| Is there a usecase here for marketplaces? So you could sell to a
| marketplace like ThredUp, and then ThredUp would offer lending to
| its consumer audience?
|
| Am I understanding this correctly?
| jon-fry wrote:
| Marketplaces are great, but the lending product would be to the
| businesses on the marketplace. Not the consumer side.
| ahstilde wrote:
| Gotcha, so it'd be a product offering for the supply, not the
| demand.
|
| Do you use the transaction history of the sellers to know if
| they're good to lend to?
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(page generated 2021-03-04 23:00 UTC)